Brandi`s Menses

What a yummy post title that is. So anyway, today I was going though my logs and I have some traffic from a site called brandimensions.com. It's one of those newfangled market intelligence companies that monitors the blogosphere to track what us consumers are saying about our corporate overlords, so their clients can tweak their ad campaigns and revv up the spin doctors when needed.

They also field an interesting service offering to 'generate buzz', where they'll find otherwise credible bloggers whose opinion can be bought with some cheap trinket or other to write nice things about Brand X so as to influence their readers and other bloggers. It's very simmilar in concept to the Judas Goat.

Abattoirs and slaughterhouses around the world keep goats, called Judas goats, which are trained to associate with cattle and sheep. The cattle can smell fear and death around the big machine with the smiley face on it so they won't go near it by themselves, but when their friend the Judas Goat walks through and comes out OK they follow, and then have a brief but fatal encounter with modern meat technology. What's important is that it only takes one Judas goat to lead a whole herd of animals, against every instinct they have, to sharp steely doom. And the goats can do this over and over, every day. Now imagine the blogosphere equivalent.

Of course, this supposes that consumers are sheeplike and will follow along with the Judas Goat of Brand X, but I'd say that's a fair assumption. People are intelligent and media savvy and all that, but we use our thinking brains on what's important to us, the big things, challenges in our lives, sudoku. We don't think long and intensely about every small choice we have to make, we need our brains working on more important stuff.

Thus if I'm in a supermarket deciding between green Winnie the Pooh socks and black Winnie the Pooh socks (yay! Tigger!) I'm not going to choose very carefully, it doesn't matter much to me which I get. But it matters to the guys who make green socks. Oh yes. Very much. So they have motivation to find a Judas Goat to give free green socks to because the very small influence this person has might well tip my purchasing decision.

I see this as yet another way big companies will try to control us unknowing masses, and must be resisted.

On the plus side, my first thought on entering the Brandimensions site wasn't fnegh at corporate manipulation. My first thought was ''What the hell were they thinking?'' Brandimensions? Brand Dimensions (two words) is a very good name for a company that sells brand metrics, but Brandimensions...

I don't know how it parses for you, but when I see that word my brain spits back Brandi-mensions. Far as I'm concerned, Brandi's a stripper name, and not one of the good stripper names like Tiffany or Jade. Brandi's the one who's 34 and the only reason she's still working the clubs - those that will have her - is because she needs money for her habit. That's the connotation their name brought up, the stretch marks, veins and nasty stray pubes of a past prime drug user on a stripper pole. And the 'mensions' bit? Seems vaguely like it might be to do with womens' periods. If it weren't for the formal white site design I might have assumed I was at a fetish page I didn't want to see.

But maybe that's just me being a perv. Maybe they were hoping the average user would see 'Brandy', the drink, and associate their business with that. So let's think about brandy for a second. It's made from uvas, the reproductive organ of a plant, that is then digested with bacteria or yeast to make cheap wine that doesn't sell and so has all the goodness boiled out of it in a still. That's where brandy comes from. It's an old people drink, very traditional. A good Republican drink. If there were a polar opposite to brown teenage girls doing vodka-jelly bodyshots in a nightclub it would be George Bush Senoir huffing brandy by the fire. (This can in fact be proved mathematically using Georges Gardet's 'Boisson Distribution and Analysis' method).

So they screwed up. Who'd pay for internet advice 'Brandy mentions'? The ruminations of old folk under the influence of brandy doesn't sound like the sort of tech knowledge that builds great dot.coms. It's too late now, they've registered the domain, incorporated a company and they're open for business. With a silly name. And they're going to know that I'm out here - trashing their brand and what they do - because it's their job to know stuff like that.

Haha! Suck it up.